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devil

I have been meaning to write this article for you all, lovely lurkers, for a long time, and I haven’t gotten the wherewithal to get beyond a detailed outline. So it hit me today: why fight it? I hereby post the detailed outline of my article about villains and beasts in recent story as cyborg–in other words, why is it that the cyborg is scary today, whereas the scary monster back in the day was a beast?

This idea was inspired by musings about Marina Warner’s excellent academic work, From the Beast to the Blonde, further filled in by looking at old class lectures and materials from my DU course: Villains, Monsters and Foes, and today finally posted as I just watched Blade Runner again (a cut I hadn’t seen), and so the idea of the android “skin job” is still rather on the brain.

I am hereby inviting you all, lovely lurkers, to add meat to this skeleton in the comments of this post. Any of these mere mentions/notes/premises that spur a thought or a tangent, please do share. Maybe together we can finally get the article written. Oh, and all page #s you see haphazardly cited here are from Warner’s book.

SCARY MONSTERS ARE ROBOTS NOW. THEY USED TO BE BEASTLY. WHY?

Outline by Jenn Zuko

Borg (hive mind)

Replicant (can’t tell who’s who)

I, Robot (existentialism / danger of AI) Also Terminator for both

[does Frankenstein’s monster fit here?]

All of the above are potentially uncontrollable.

Why so scary?

Humanoid but Not Human (uncanny valley)

Unstoppable (Tripods)

Replaces reality (how to battle?)

From the Beast to the Blonde –Marina Warner

Latin “monstrare” = to show (p.299)

[notes from DU Villains course: *to unveil the monster is to vanquish it*] How to unveil when it’s impossible to tell? (Voigt-Kampf test infallible?)

Replicants aren’t shown: they hide in plain sight (like Dr. Who’s plastic Autons). More difficult to unveil than a beast, as it’s hard to tell who’s the monster, who the human

Being Devoured = sexuality

“Bestiality, cannibalism, & eroticism are bound up together” (p.302)

Ferociousness of being a beast not so scary in this day of us overpowering and overtaking anything truly wild.

“Tapping the power of the animal no longer seems charged with danger, let alone evil, but rather a necessary part of healing. Art of different media widely accepts the fall of man, from master and namer of animals to a mere hopeful candidate for inclusion as one of their number.” (p.307)

Nostalgia for the wild: nostalgia = regret (also Noble Savage)

…like tears in the rain…

The cyborg is leaving the wild at best, eradicating it at worst. Many cyborg monsters live in a world where there is no wild left. That’s terrifying.

Replicants: beautiful female replicant or clone (Leeloo?)(Pris: made for sex but also deadly)

“Mudd’s Women” (is Data sexy? [Old Yellow Eyes])

Does this have to do with the female as attractive only bc of her body?

Scene in American Gods: man gets devoured by goddess (swallowed up literally by her sex); is the allure of the female android connected to the terror of being devoured? [Warner: in old stories, being devoured = sex]

(is eroticism a tangent, or immediately related to what it is to be human?) (another related-to-eroticism tangent in here about the living dead: why are vampires sexy? inhuman that used to be human but now dead; Walking Dead characters having trouble seeing that the zombies aren’t the person anymore. But this is another paper, methinks. Something related to the inhuman as scary here, though…)